It caused massive inconvenience to millions of gamers around the world at the supposedly biggest PC gaming platform, Steam, which was having a major outage on Christmas Eve.
When the emotions of the holidays were at their peak on the Winter Sale, logins, purchases, and other community actions were dead because server crashes did not allow them.
Outage Hits Hard
Downdetector reported a peak of over 60,000 users encountering problems during this period, further corroborating the severity of the incident.
The SteamDB recorded any type of websocket error, missing Web APIs, and store pages that would not load, thus interfering with user profile access and multiplayer groups to titles like Counter-Strike 2 and Dota 2.
Even Steam Deck users had to go to the offline mode since it started to not work with Bad Gateway errors and turned expected festive unboxing into frustration sessions.
Why Did it Happen?
Steam’s user base expanded consistently throughout 2025. Monthly active users reached 132 million, while daily active users averaged 69 million.
The daily engagement rate stands at 52.27%, meaning more than half of all monthly users access the platform daily.
The platform crossed the 40 million concurrent user threshold for the first time in March 2025, reaching 40.27 million simultaneous users.
Analysts have linked the crash to congested servers or interruptions of AWS servers, which followed a series of downtimes in the 15th-23rd of December.
These outbursts have a burden on the infrastructure of Steam, and the holiday sales reveal the limits of scaling in Steam, though Valve has not confirmed a cause.
User Fallout
A Reddit user commented:
It’s Valve's way of telling us to spend Christmas Eve with our families.
GOG, naturally, did what it does, with a not-too-subtle reminder that its games work perfectly well regardless of the state of its servers.
Road Ahead
By 11.30 PM ET, the services were stabilized, but access problems still happened here and there. Valve also kept a low profile, which is unlike other situations with DDoS attacks.
It is believed that the backend upgrading will subsequently come, since the growth of Steam requires the ability to handle the highs of more than 40+ million users without affecting its stability.
Gamers can track Downdetector for live status updates before the next big sale.
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